Here’s another one you might be drawn to given its high profile license. Like Fantasy Flight’s WARCRAFT, AGE OF MYTHOLOGY was one of the first games to really bring together Eurogame ideas with American style gameplay.

When I first played AGE OF MYTHOLOGY I thought it was great. In retrospect, what was exciting me about the game wasn’t the gameplay itself or the mechanics but the possibility that it seemed to present of bringing together a PUERTO RICO style resource management and development game with the dice-tossing monster mayhem of a game like the classic Avalon Hill TITAN. In the end, AGE OF MYTHOLOGY fails to deliver on that premise and instead it turns out to be an awkward game that somehow manages to miss the distinct elements of both Euro and Ameritrash games.

The wrong things are abstracted (like the fact that there’s no geographic element- i.e., no map) and the inclusion of clearly PUERTO RICO-inspired building effects feels clunky and premature. Designer Glenn Drover has moved on to other (better) designs such as RAILROAD TYCOON and the recent AGE OF EMPIRES III, which I guess could be considered a “sequel” to this game. (Michael will be offering a full review of AoE III in a future column. – ed)

3) RUNEBOUND ( Fantasy Flight Games , 2004)

Oh, Fantasy Flight. I love you guys, I really do. But this clunker, originally designed rather half-assed by Eurogame mainstay Martin Wallace, is the ultimate exercise in what a lot of gamers call “multiplayer solitaire” – meaning that players have little or no influence over what others are doing.

The vast bulk of a game of RUNEBOUND finds players either trying to figure out where they can move based on the strange terrain-based movement system whereby players roll dice to see where they can move or tallying up hits with an endless series of d20 rolls. It’s just all very uninteresting and despite a slew (and I mean a SLEW) of extra card decks, expansion packs, variant maps, and other extensions the game never manages to get its fantasy feel right or anything approaching an interesting mechanical exercise or a richly developed fantasy world.

There’s plenty of games out there that manage to do what RUNEBOUND sets out to do in much more interesting and engaging ways – the German game RETURN OF THE HEROES and the Czechoslovakian game PROPHECY provide a much more realized, compelling excursion if the idea of an “RPG on a board” appeals to you.

4) ANYTHING PUBLISHED BY STEVE JACKSON GAMES -

Steve Jackson started out publishing some pretty significant titles in the early 1980s like OGRE and THE AWFUL GREEN THINGS FROM SPACE but these days the company’s bread-and-butter are an endless cavalcade of simple, “take that” style card games festooned with geek-cred artist Jon Kovalic’s crude cartooning and an almost limitless supply of gamer in-jokes and the sort of humor usually reserved for the t-shirts of grotesquely obese Sci-Fi con attendees.

The games, mechanically, are very simple and might give your friends a laugh or two (being drunk helps) and there’s one to appeal to pretty much every sub-genre of gamer: there’s a Cthulhu one, a Superhero one, a Goth one. But don’t fall into the trap. I’ve seen more newbie gamers walk out of a game store (including my own) happily clutching one or more of these games and coming back to say either the game completely sucked or that their friends are hopelessly addicted to it and refuse to play anything else. Bad friends or bad game?